Climate deal done, but difficult future remains

Mike De Souza, Postmedia News12.10.2011

Canadian Minister of Environment Affairs Peter Kent attends a plenary on the final day of negotiations of the COP17 Climate Change Conference at International Convention Centre in Durban on December 10, 2011.

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International climate change talks emerged from a standoff Sunday, as a Europe-led alliance of countries used a weakened Kyoto Protocol as a bargaining...

DURBAN, South Africa — A historic climate-change deal faces several hurdles, including criticism from Canada, which says it will drive a hard bargain on new international laws to slash all major global sources of heat-trapping pollution.

The Canadian government left the climate-change conference in Durban, South Africa, saying that the deal brokered early Sunday was fair and provides a framework to develop yet another binding agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

But Environment Minister Peter Kent criticized some aspects of the deal, including the extension of the Kyoto Protocol and a green fund to help developing countries, sparking fears that Canada was standing in the way of real progress.

The 195 members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change finished a record-breaking, marathon session two days behind schedule, and charted a course toward a new regime to be finalized by 2015 in an effort to stave off dangerous human interference with the atmosphere.

“Although these negotiations will be difficult, we are cautiously optimistic that we will reach a new agreement by 2015,” said Kent.

The Kyoto agreement, signed and ratified by virtually all of the countries except the U.S. in 1997, will be extended, but will not have the participation of Canada, Russia and Japan, who all said they wanted the other large emitting countries, including China and India, to take on their own commitments.

“We want to avoid another Kyoto-like pact at all costs,” said Kent. “Kyoto was not effective and was not good for Canada. The previous government should not have ratified it.”

Although countries agreed on terms to make a new global green climate fund to support efforts in developing countries to adapt to climate change and promote clean energy growth, Kent said Canada would not provide any new money for the fund until the recipients committed to targets and transparent reporting of their efforts.

Steven Guilbeault, co-founder of Equiterre, a Quebec-based environmental group, credited the European Union, the Alliance of Small Island States and the least-developed countries for leading the summit to its final package.

But he said the deal could have been much stronger if the Canadian government and its allies had shown more ambition.

“A historic agreement was within our grasp in Durban, but the combined efforts of the U.S., Canada and Japan have undermined a positive outcome here,” said Guilbeault. “We leave with an agreement that does not do enough to take us away from the current path of four degrees Celsius of warming and towards dangerous climate change.”

Countries have agreed that they must limit global warming to two degrees Celsius of average global temperatures above pre-industrial levels to avoid serious damage to ecosystems and the economy.

The UN’s top climate change official said the new regime would compel countries such as Canada to show leadership and do more.

“They will now engage over the next few years in a very constructive conversation about how the responsibility that lies on every single shoulder is going to be taken forward,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s climate change secretariat.

“Of course developed countries will have to take the lead and they will have to continue to provide funding and technology to developing countries.”

At home, the NDP environment critic was skeptical about whether Kent’s prediction of successful negotiations would come to fruition. Megan Leslie said that while she was pleased to see a deal get done, she didn’t think that Canada would have a strong voice in negotiations over the coming years.

“Any step forward, even as small as it is, is a step forward,” Leslie said in a telephone interview. “I’m worried it’s too little, too late.”

She said the government’s actions at the conference and Kent’s change of tune as talks went on would marginalize Canada leading up to the 2015 timeline for a binding agreement. The agreement means that over the next four years, the Conservatives don’t have to do much about climate change and get off “scot-free.”

“I wonder what the future deal will be and how it will pan out,” she said.

“It could be a significant step forward, but I’m not optimistic based on the behaviour of this government so far.”

Liberal environment critic Kirsty Duncan was equally skeptical about the deal itself, saying the government’s actions at the conference helped to delay any real action on climate change until 2015.

The longer negotiations drag on, the worse the situation will get, Duncan said.

Scientists have warned that the world needs to reduce total emissions to 44 gigatonnes per year by 2020 from the current rate of 48 gigatonnes annually in order to have a 66 per cent chance of avoid potentially catastrophic environmental impacts. The current pace of global emissions could see output hit more than 50 gigatonnes, putting the “gigatonne gap” at between six and 11 gigatonnes.

“The agreement does nothing to reduce emissions,” Duncan said. “The reality is the government continues to ignore the science of global warming.”

The deal was brokered after the European countries used a pledge for a second round of Kyoto commitments as a bargaining chip to get the rest of the parties to accept a mandate for a comprehensive successor regime.

“We came here with plan A and we concluded with this plan A to save one planet Earth for the future of our children and grandchildren,” said Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, who chaired the conference.

The Europe-led block, including small-island states and the least-developed nations, had urged the conference to require a binding protocol or legal instrument, to be negotiated within four years and taking effect in 2018.

But they rejected adding a third choice that would allow countries instead to choose another “legal option” in the future to address global warming — an option they believed would be too weak to be binding.

Both China and India, the world’s first and third largest annual sources of greenhouse gases, were skeptical, suggesting that industrialized countries, which have historically produced more than half of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, were trying to avoid paying their fair share.

But the countries later brokered a compromise to toughen the wording and ensure that the eventual solution would have legal force but fall under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was founded based on the principle that developed nations should pay for their historic emissions that remain in the atmosphere.

The marathon session was supposed to wrap up on Friday, but instead ended Sunday morning to become the longest UN climate summit in 20 years.

Moments before reaching the compromise, Indian minister Jayanthi Natarajan said her country had made several concessions through the negotiations, but she questioned whether countries were trying to make India a scapegoat for talks collapsing.

“I’m only wondering if there’s an effort here to shift the burden of this entire climate-change problem upon countries who have not (co-operated) to nations who have not contributed to this problem and that is wrong,” she said, before the proposal was modified.

U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern said that the Durban conference “ended up quite well.”

“The (Durban platform) is the piece that was the matching piece with the Kyoto Protocol,” he said. “We got the kind of symmetry that we had been focused on since the beginning of the Obama administration. This had all the elements that we were looking for.”

China’s lead negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, stressed that his country took legally binding agreements seriously and was prepared to honour its commitments. But he questioned why the developed nations were not able to do the same under the Kyoto Protocol.

“We developing countries will be very serious in our implementation of these documents,” said Xie, speaking through a translator. “We are taking actions (and) we want to see your real actions.”